David Ford – 1st ROAD BLOG from his 2013 North American Tour

The UK based artist, David Ford, is currently on his 2013 tour through North America. While he’s on this tour, he’ll be blogging for the site. You can check out his first entry about the Chicago part of his journey, after the break.

We rented a car and crawled through the Lincoln tunnel and into the barely moving traffic of New Jersey, bound for Chicago. Back on the American road and it was raining. I had packed for a month of summer in North America based largely on my experience of the sweltering June I had spent in New York a few years ago and had entirely disregarded the possibility of inclement weather.

The short jog from parked car to the first of a great many lunch stops of dubious nutritional value had me almost entirely soaked.

America is big. Maps don’t really do justice to the scale of the place. If I left my home in England and went for a drive of similar proportions to this one, I could find myself in the industrial heart of Poland. A few years ago I finished a tour in Atlanta before driving to start another in Portland, Oregon. This drive would have taken me from my front door to the delightful neighbourhood of downtown Baghdad, 15 countries away.

For the first time on this enormous continent, I am travelling with a band. Not your regular band of hired guns though. Instead I have assembled a small but elegant musical collective. Jarrod Dickenson, Emily Grove and myself are songwriters and singers who usually take to the stage alone. While this can be a powerfully communicative way of presenting songs to an audience, it can get kinda lonesome after a couple of years. So we have stirred the waters of our talent pool into a mighty ocean of awesomeness as we each take turns to play back-up for each other. Having toured the UK in this fashion earlier in the year, I don’t know why everybody isn’t doing it. I can only assume it to be the innate laziness of the average musician. We are mostly a wretched people.

We stopped for the night a couple of hours short of Chicago in accordance with the masterplan. The motel is one of my favourite features of the Great American road trip. Usually I like to find the crappiest one available, the kind of place where you wake up to find the building encircled in plastic tape bearing the words “police line, do not cross”. We checked in and dragged our bags down a corridor that smelled of marijuana and resounded with the sound of what can only have been extra-marital relations. In the morning, the shower ran efficiently for a good minute before emitting a deep sustaining tone that vibrated around the building and suggested that the pipes were about to shake loose from behind the wall and make a bid for freedom.

The show went well. Schuba’s Tavern is a quality operation and the people there are the best kind of friendly. For a first night, it went off with minimal drama and after a slice of pizza the thickness and apparent density of a paving slab, we rolled out of town to our exclusive accommodations by a freeway exit somewhere near O’Hare International Airport, having successfully lived the rock and roll cliché of visiting one of the world’s great cities and seeing none of it.

Tomorrow we will not be seeing Detroit.

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Did you enjoy this blog? Do you plan on going to see him on this tour? Let us know in the comments below!